Ivan Raykoff

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As a musician I strive to balance the pleasures of making music with the rigors of thinking about it -- or do I mean the pleasures of thinking about it and the rigors of making it? As an undergraduate I studied piano at the Eastman School of Music and in Vienna on my junior year abroad, then at the Liszt Academy in Budapest on a Fulbright scholarship. For graduate studies I focused on contemporary music and critical studies in music at the University of California-San Diego.

Before joining the Lang Arts faculty in 2003, I taught at the University of South Carolina and at Whitman College in Washington State. Both of these teaching experiences productively shaped my approach to pedagogy and curriculum development at Lang. My own undergraduate studies took me from the relatively narrow focus of a conservatory curriculum to a broader liberal arts education at the University of Rochester, so I’m an advocate for a well-rounded interdisciplinary education that situates music among the other arts and in the larger contexts of history, culture, and society.

My scholarly work focuses on musical performance, popular culture, and perceptual practices in the arts. My book Dreams of Love: Playing the Romantic Pianist explores the concert pianist as a cultural icon, considering the role of technology in producing and perpetuating the mythology of the pianist’s romantic allure over the past two centuries. I co-edited A Song for Europe: Popular Music and Politics in the Eurovision Song Contest, a defining collection of essays about the politics and poetics of the world’s largest and longest-running annual televised popular music competition. I'm currently completing a follow-up book titled Another Song for Europe: Music, Taste and Values in the Eurovision Song Contest. My current research on perceptual practices explores music and touch, and musical haptics, for a new book titled Touching Sounds: The Tactility of Music.

In 2013 I was a Fulbright Visiting Professor in the University of Vienna’s Department of Musicology, where I researched the musical graphics movement and lectured on the topic of visual music. I also led a Eurovision seminar that term, and again in May 2015 when the contest was hosted in Vienna. I had been a student in Vienna twenty-five years before, so it was an amazing experience to return again, this time to teach.